The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Debunking Da Bunk: A Discussion of James Van Praagh and His Claims

I was greatly surprised a few weeks ago when I saw
that my pre-retirement college, Richard Stockton College, was having an
appearance in its Performing Arts Center of the “medium” James Van Praagh. Though
I recognized the privileges of freedom of speech that belong to Van Praagh,
Stockton, and everybody else in this country, I was disturbed and offended by
the college’s allowing this performance without any analytical or contradictory
discussion. Like many other colleges today, Stockton is emphasizing critical
thinking skills, and it seemed to me that to have Van P’s show, and nothing
else, was really a failure to model such skills for students.

I put out a message to college faculty and staff,
stating my position and asking whether anyone wanted to have a panel,
discussion, “teach-in”, whatever you might want to call it. Feelings about this
appeared to run high, but with a wide range of opinions, from those who shared
my concerns to those who thought it was silly or even puritanical to criticize
what was advertised as a “fun afternoon”. Nevertheless, some people stepped
forward as willing to speak in public about their opinions of Van P,
mediumship, and spiritualism in general.

The programs for Van P’s performance made very
strong claims for his ability to talk to the dead and to bring messages from
the dead to the living. (The dead presumably do not need a return service.)
According to the program, Van P “is known as a ‘survival evidence medium’,
meaning that he provides evidential proof of life after death via detailed
messages from the spiritual realms.” I don’t think you can make the claim more
plainly than that, nor can you make claims more plainly than Van P’s announcement
during the performance that he can see people’s auras and know if they are
lying, and that each of us has a colored ribbon from the top of our heads all
the way up to a star that has our name on it.

Van P’s performance is presented as evidence that all
his statements are correct. He states that a spirit is near him and identifies
the age and sex of that person or states a name or an initial letter that may
have meaning for someone in the audience. When there is a response from an
audience member, Van P then spins out and develops the message by using information
the person provides. “He was a man who liked facts”—“Yes, he was a lawyer”-- “You still have some of his law books”—“Yes”—“One
is tan with a red top to the pages”-- “Yes!”,
et cetera. In one case, however, there was what appeared to be a remarkable “hit”
on a fact, which led me to wonder to myself whether there were confederates in
the audience. If you’d like to know more about what Van P does, there is a
youtube piece about this showman-shaman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_1TtZ1tNww.

What I actually want to talk about here is the
discussion that followed the performance. I don’t suppose anything was said
that has never been said before, but there were one or two points that I did
not expect. A number of people from the audience followed us into the
discussion room and demanded to know whether we would be “for” or “against”;
when I said that was what we were going to talk about, they reversed course and
were gone at once. Three people who were apparently believers in mediumship
stayed for a short time and one spoke of a previous meeting she had had with
Van P, as well as of her contacts with her recently-deceased mother. I
appreciated her willingness to give this information. Most of the other participants
were current or retired faculty of the college, or students, but Michael Cluff
of the South Jersey Humanists was kind enough to come and address humanist
concerns about exploitation of the bereaved by self-proclaimed mediums. Others
talked about issues like the confirmation bias and poor judgment of probability
that plague human thinking about spiritualistic practices.

A question that I did not expect came from a
historian of religion, who asked us all why we need to debunk spiritualist
beliefs, given, she said, that these must play some role in the culture’s
functioning or they would not be there (a side argument almost started on that
last bit). This excellent question forced many of us to think hard about the
assumption that I and others made: that if
it’s bunk, it should be debunked.

It took a while to focus on this issue, as we had
all been too busy debunking to think about why we wanted to do it. The first
reason was one that had already been mentioned several times-- that those who claim to talk to spirits and
bring information to the living may be exploitative and drain the vulnerable of
their resources. It was also suggested that for the bereaved to spend their
time consulting mediums caused delays in the grief process; however, we did not
really know if this was true or even if it had been studied systematically, and
there was also some uncertainty as to whether grieving really has to follow the
guidelines standardized for it in the Unites States in the last century.

After a while, people began to consider the “slippery
slope” concern: that acceptance of an unfounded spiritualistic belief system
might make it easier for individuals to accept without evidence other beliefs,
leading to practical decisions that might be harmful. One participant pointed
out the multimillion-dollar industry making homeopathic medicines-- drugs that are thought by their advocates to
impart their “vibrations” to water, so that a highly diluted version is
expected to have a more powerful effect than one that is undiluted (the opposite
of the usual dose-response relationship). Drugstores stock these, and convinced
parents treat their children and themselves with totally ineffectual homeopathic
remedies rather than seeking real medical care, creating a potential for harm.
Along the same line, I spoke about the issues familiar to some readers of this
blog-- the conviction that mothers and
unborn babies communicate by telepathy and that the mother’s thoughts of ambivalence
about the pregnancy “mark” the baby psychologically, causing adopted children
above all to be scarred in ways that cannot be treated with standard
psychological or psychiatric care and must be “healed” by unconventional,
potentially harmful, treatment.

We were thus able to find practical advantages to
effective debunking (although we remained pessimistic about the possibility of
actually achieving this with true believers). Still, I continue my commitment
to my a priori position:

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.